


memories of you on memory foam

by atlantisairlock



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - The Time Traveler's Wife, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Angst, F/M, Not Canon Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-05
Updated: 2016-05-05
Packaged: 2018-06-06 12:48:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,162
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6754462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atlantisairlock/pseuds/atlantisairlock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Peggy is six years old, she time-travels for the very first time, the first of many.</p>
            </blockquote>





	memories of you on memory foam

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kkenobi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kkenobi/gifts).



> title from 'if these sheets were states' by all time low.

When Peggy is six years old, she time-travels for the very first time, the first of many.

It's disorienting, to say the least. She doesn't understand where she is, or why she's there, or how she got there. She's standing in a cafe, the sun nearly blinding her, and everything is so bright, so loud, so chaotic. A giant screen a ways from her reads  _9 MARCH 2015._

There is a man sitting on a chair right in front of her, holding a cup of coffee in one hand and a rectangular object in the other. He stares right at her -  _through_ her, somehow - and there's the saddest smile on his face that she's ever seen. He doesn't move towards her.

"Hey, Pegs," he whispers. 

She frowns. "How do you know my name?"

He opens his mouth to answer, and just like that, she snaps back to the present. 

That begins - everything.

When Steve is six years old, he gets into a fight for the very first time, the first of many.

He doesn't come out of it very well off, and he's tired and hungry and bleeding but he feels a little proud of himself. He doesn't know it yet, but that's the start of a life spent protecting other people, putting everyone before himself. He limps to a little nook behind a trash can and tries to figure out how he's going to stem the flow of blood from the gash on his leg. 

When he hears someone gasp, softly, he jerks upright to see a beautiful woman hovering over him, looking more than a little taken aback. Steve knows he must look a sight, especially to someone who seems so immaculately dressed, so put together. His mother's taught him that he should always be polite to ladies, so Steve scrambles to his feet despite the pain. "Ma'am."

"Steve." She greets him by name. Steve wonders how she knows it - and then it dawns on him. She's probably with one of those charity groups that occasionally head to the poorer areas of the city and hand out food to hungry kids. Does that mean his name is finally - _finally_ on the list? 

"These are for you." She's carrying a basket of food. Nothing lavish, but enough to fill his stomach - bread, cheese, biscuits, water, chicken, even some fresh fruit and a bottle of Coke. Instantly he's salivating, although he tries to keep a straight face. Food. Real, proper food, and there's enough in that basket to last him a week. He can barely believe it. There has to be a catch. 

But all the lady seems to want to do is watch him sit down and eat, help him bandage up his leg. She cautions him not to gobble his food and urges him to eat more of the fruit, juice dripping down his chin. When he's done, she helps him wrap up what's left of the food and tells him to bring it straight home to his mother. Steve can only look up at her, eyes wide, torn between bewilderment and gratitude. 

"Are you from one of the charity groups?" Steve asks in wonder, and the lady smiles, shaking her head. "I'm here alone. For you."

He can't wrap his head around this. Why would a complete stranger do all this for a dirty, ragged boy she doesn't know? He _has_ to ask. "Why would you do this?" 

The woman rests a hand on his shoulder. "You'll understand someday." 

The next time it happens, she's in school. One moment she's walking to the field and the next, she's standing outside a tiny shack-like house watching a young woman rock a baby in her arms. 

"What will you name him?" Someone asks from inside, unseen. 

The woman smiles despite the tears in her eyes. "Steven. Steven Grant Rogers. It's a fine name."

When Peggy is whisked back to the present moment, she prints the name carefully into her notebook. 

She has a feeling she'll see him again. 

Steve grows up and makes a friend. Bucky keeps him grounded and never lets him get too rowdy, and always comes through in a pinch when Steve bites off too much than he can chew and finds himself in a  _really_ serious situation.

He doesn't see the woman again for a long time. When he does, once again, he's in the middle of a scuffle. He's just gotten a fist to his jaw and he's ducking down to hide from the worst of the next blow when he hears his attacker let out a piercing howl and stumble back. There's the sound of shuffling footsteps and the thud of shoes hitting the ground, and when he opens his eyes, it's the woman again.

She looks just a little older, decked in a smart uniform and holding a package. She looks disapproving, yet fond. "So Barnes was right. You really are a little troublemaker."

"I'm not a troublemaker!" Steve retorts stoutly, and she laughs, setting the package down at his feet. "Well then, that's good, because I certainly wasn't intending on giving a rabble-rouser this parcel of food." 

She's teasing, he can tell. Once again, she's brought him things that he'd never be able to afford otherwise, along with the basics that will fill his stomach. There's chocolate and tinned peaches and a ham sandwich -  _treats._ She sits beside him and watches him eat, but keeps checking her watch. He's halfway through the small box of raisins he's fished out of the parcel when she gets up from the ledge they're both perched on. "I have to go now, Steve."

He nearly chokes on the raisins. "Wait!" He manages to say around his mouthful, quickly swallowing. "Please, ma'am, what's your name?"

She hesitates, glancing over him before giving him a minute shake of her head. "You don't need to know that yet." She gets down on one knee so she's at his eye level, grasping his shoulders gently and looking into his eyes. "Steve, take care of yourself, all right? As best as you can. Promise me." 

This woman is a mystery, but for some reason or another, Steve just knows he can trust her, so he nods. "I promise."

"I'll see you soon, then." She smiles, getting up and turning the corner without another word.

Steve watches her go.

She gets used to the time-travelling. 

She won't profess to understand how and why it's happening, or why the process of it seems to revolve around Steve. She's come to accept it, mostly - she can't control it, and there's nobody from whom she can get an explanation, so why not just go along with it? Every time it happens, it's a free visit to America too, after all. 

He's getting older, as is she. They're coming to understand each other better - whenever Peggy arrives, she stays and talks until she begins to feel that pull she's come to recognise is a signal that she's returning to her own time. 

The length of the visits are erratic and unpredictable; she's stayed as short as a minute and as long as five hours. Either way, she's always around Steve. 

At some point, she can't remember when, she begins hoping they'll really get to meet as equals. 

The nameless woman becomes a constant in his life.

He's... kind of grasped the fact that she's time-travelling, even though she's never come right out and said it. She changes - every time she visits, she seems younger or older than she did before, and when they chat, she remembers things that have never happened - haven't happened  _yet,_ Steve supposes - or can't for the life of her recall events that they've mentioned in passing just prior. And she always, always asks him for the date, the year, and how old he is.

Bucky doesn't believe him, but then he's never met the woman. 

Steve thinks he would ask how she's managing to accomplish the impossible, but somehow, he gets the feeling that she just doesn't seem to know either. 

Sarah Rogers dies.

Things move pretty quickly after that. Somehow or another, Steve finds himself snapped up by Erskine after telling him what he believes in, and then he's on a truck to Camp Leigh. He's in a line with a bunch of other candidates who smirk and sneer at his size, jeering at him. He keeps his head up - this is something he's used to.

When Peggy Carter gets off that truck and starts walking towards them - 

She sees him in the line of candidates, and something settles, ignites inside her. 

They're finally meeting for real - in the present, both of them, together. She's a professional, doesn't show how joyous she is to see him, but he does her proud anyway. He's always been smart and brave and resourceful, so she's really not surprised when it's him that gets to ride on the truck back. 

"Hi, Steve," she says when they're far enough away, letting the smile spread across her face. "I'm Peggy Carter."

And he finally learns her name. 

He's selected to be injected with the serum. Everyone expects him to come out from Erskine's contraption a different man.

Peggy knows better, and Steve is glad that she does - he comes out taller, stronger, hardier, but the same man he was before, still ready to dive on a grenade to protect the people around him. She looks awed when she sees him for the first time, after, but there's also something in her expression, something darker, shadowed. 

He doesn't get much time to ponder over it because Erskine is shot and killed, and he's got to run like hell after Kruger. But he keeps it in mind. 

He'll have to ask Peggy why she looked so...  _agonised_ when she saw him again. 

She has to admit, when she sees Steve in the line at Camp Leigh...

He looks like she'd have expected him to look. After all, she's seen him many a time as a child, and he was thin and undernourished, so it makes sense that he was such a reedy little thing. 

But something niggles at the back of her mind - that memory she's kept from her childhood. The Steve she remembers seeing as a six-year-old - it was undeniably Steve. She'd know that face anywhere.

But he looked - 

She puzzles over it until Steve's selected from the batch of candidates - as if there was any other alternative. He undergoes the procedure, and when Erskine reveals Steve -  _Captain America_ \- ice slides through Peggy's veins. 

Suddenly, she just  _knows._ Something clicks inside her. She's absolutely certain that what she saw when she was six was Steve, far in the future, and while it might have been possible for either of them to still be alive in the year 2015, that's further than he could ever possibly be while _still_ looking like a thirty-year-old man. 

_How?_

One part of the puzzle's been answered - now she has another. 

Howard Stark makes him a shield. Steve doesn't know it then, but Peggy tells him that the shield is going to become a real icon, as he is. She helps him test it, then just as she's about to take a gun and shoot a full clip at it, she checks the clock on the wall and sets the pistol down. "I have to go. She's coming."

"Who?"

Peggy half-smiles. "Me." She laughs at Steve's raised eyebrows. "I remember my slightly younger self coming here, at this time, this day, and meeting you. I shouldn't be around when you talk to her - me? I wasn't here. I remember that." 

She exits, goes next door, and true to her word, younger-Peggy appears a minute later. 

"Well, you've certainly come a ways," she says, eyeing the room around her critically.

Steve manages to grin. "You're in the next room, did you know that?"

Younger-Peggy chuckles quietly. "I guess I will, in the future." 

It's weird, especially when she disappears - back to her present, he supposes - and Peggy re-enters the room, looking vaguely amused. "The words are the same. I guess it would have caused a paradox if they weren't."

Steve just rolls with it. 

Peggy doesn't tell Steve what she knows, what she's seen. She might be wrong, after all, and she thinks she really might cause a paradox if she interferes with the timeline too much. 

But she still wants to know, so badly -  _how does Steve make it so far into the future?_

She gets her answer when he falls into the ocean. She promises to teach him how to dance, and then she loses communication with him, and that's when she just feels it in old bones that have memories imprinted on every inch of them, memories she doesn't have yet. 

Somehow, he makes it all the way to the - next millennium, perhaps? And all while looking like he hasn't aged a day.

She's not sure of how exactly it'll work. Maybe he survives the fall and the serum is powerful enough that it'll heal him, and he'll stumble back to them? Or maybe it provides some sort of immortality and that's how he survives, all that way, all that time. 

Or maybe he's dead and something else resurrects him - 

Either way,

either way, he's gone, at least for now.

A month later, he hasn't come back, and they've had to move on. Peggy struggles to be okay with the fact that she might never see him again, not in the same timeline, not as equals. She tries to reassure herself with the fact that there'll be sporadic visits into the past from now on - Steve has written down some approximate dates and times for her to take note of, things she ought to bring with her. 

It's not enough, but she tries. 

Life goes on - it always does. She breaks into a HYDRA base, takes down Reinhardt, meets Angie, moves into the Griffith, frees Jarvis, captures Dottie... 

One of the dates that Steve's written down draws closer. She packs a basket of food, carefully selected based on nutritional value and preservative ability, and steels herself. For all that, however, she's not prepared for the shock when she sees Steve again. It's been a long time since she's seen pre-serum Steve, let along young Steve... as he is now, he can't be older than seven or eight, so pale, skin stretched over the bone, but eyes still bright with ferocity and determination. Peggy feels an ache beneath her ribs. This is her Steve, who doesn't know yet what he's destined to become, the strength he will embody. 

For now, he's just a boy - a hungry boy.

"Steve," she says, holding out the food in her hands. "This is for you."

"I'll see you soon," she tells him, the next time, so long after, so long before.

When she returns to the present, she cries. She's not even sure she'll make it to 2015. 

He  _has_ to come back before that. He has to.

Far in the past, Steve grows up.

Far in the future, Peggy grows old. 

The last date Steve's got written on the piece of paper that's practically disintegrating in her hands now seems to be the last time she ever/will ever time-travel, and all she has to keep of him is a couple of black-and-white photographs, and memories. 

Five years before she retires from SHIELD, Steve Jobs invents a nifty little thing called the iPhone, rectangular and palm-sized and overwhelmingly familiar. Peggy watches the launch on her TV, older now and far more tired, and lets herself hope. 

Maybe she'll see him again, one more time, before she dies - for real, this time. 

If he thought it was hard, dying - sort of, but not really -

coming back is even worse.

It's a whole new world, one he's not used to, and the first thing he wonders is:

_where's Peggy?_

She's losing everything, her memories slipping from her grasp like water and sand through her fingers. 

It gets harder and harder to recall his face, to believe that he'll come back to her -

\- until one morning, he finally does.

"It's been so long," she whispers, looking at him, still young and beautiful and the Steve Rogers she's always loved. 

"Well, I couldn't leave my best girl," Steve answers, eyes too-bright with tears. "Not when she owes me a dance."

This is enough. She can be at peace, now. 

But there's one more thing left to do. Of all the times she's ever jumped back and forth on the timeline, there was only one occasion she saw Steve in the new millennium and she  _knows_ it. 

With trembling hands she just manages to scrawl a barely legible date on a post-it. She's frantic when she starts speaking. "There's a cafe. Somewhere in Times Square under a screen that shows what the date is. A big screen. I don't remember much else. I was six when I saw you there. You have to be there, Steve." She's breathing hard. "Somehow or another you'll probably find it and you'll be there, or it'd cause a paradox." 

"That's the last time?" He asks, sounding pained. She nods, eyes closed. "That's the last."

She dies in her sleep, just a week after that, and the world simultaneously goes to the dogs. 

Steve has to wonder if it's just a coincidence.

A year goes by and - to put it really simply, shit happens. He keeps his appointment, though, and on 9 March, he heads down to Times Square. 

He has Peggy's note saved on his phone, a final appointment with the girl he loves. This is one final mercy that the universe has allowed him, he thinks, and Steve is grateful. It will be a short visit, but a visit nevertheless. She will keep this memory of him for the rest of her life, even to the grave. He would know. He buried her. 

He finds the cafe easily - it seems to call to him. He lets the tugging feeling guide him to a specific chair, sits down and orders a coffee from the star-struck waiter who timidly asks for an autograph, which Steve graciously gives - and then he waits. 

Ten minutes later, something seems to shimmer in front of him, and out of nowhere, a small girl appears, looking confused. She's so  _young,_ but she's undeniably  _Peggy._ Steve feels the tears welling up in his eyes. He wants to tell her everything that will happen to her from now on, how loved and respected she will be, all the incredible acts of courage and loyalty she will accomplish. But he knows what he said/will say/is supposed to say, and he wonders how long this moment will exist in the greater scheme of things, how many times this event has already occured and will occur again. There will be time to think on it later, he decides. For now - 

One last time.

_"Hey, Pegs."_


End file.
